It's Personal

I feel somehow very detached from myself right now. I can't seem to make myself take an interest in politics, or foreign affairs, or pop culture. It's as if I trend towards self-obsession as a way of overcompensating for the feeling of uprooted identity. I specifically didn't want this blog to be of a personal nature, but I do want to keep to a habit of updating it daily. It can be hard to reconcile those two things.

I feel that the groundwork for whatever is respectable in my intellect is my tendency to take myself quite seriously. I am constantly thinking, in large part because there isn't much that I let pass casually. I am a good essayist because I like to draw out the deeper significance of my ordinary life. At least, I like to do so when my life is less than painfully ordinary. Even the central idea of this blog grew out of looking at one way that I engage with my own life and applying it to social, cultural, and political issues.

But if I lose sight of the idea of personal breaking points, I will lose sight of the broader application of the same. So sometimes I have to take a moment with nothing else to do but comment on myself.

I need to change my habits. It's appalling how much time I waste when I don't have the imposed rigor of numerous deadlines. Some of it is just me being idle or blowing off steam because of the stress of my own insecurities. But I'd say that the lion's share of wasted time actually goes to me trying to do the right thing, the responsible thing.

I don't know how many times I have to acknowledge the fact that the better means of freelancing is to promote myself broadly and let clients come to me, before I begin to steadfastly heed my own advice and stop casting out vastly many very narrow nets. I get so caught up with the immediate goals that I spend entire days trying to win over a sequence of individuals when I could be building a better personal brand.

The bitter irony of it is that in the effort to be successful at my work in the short term, I limit my long-term marketing potential at the same time that I pull myself away from the awareness of why I'm doing this for a living in the first place. All this time spent looking for new clients could be better put to creative use. There's so many stories in my mind that crave expression, and so many puzzles that need to unraveled with good language.

And that brings to mind the other irony of this situation: That I have poor practices when it comes to marketing myself, but would make none of the same errors of excessive caution or shortsightedness in dealing with marketing for someone else. It's one of the strangest things about the human condition - the impossible need to see yourself from the outside.

I've got to hit a breaking point very soon. It could be the improvement of my self-promotion, or just a wholesale casting off of all the needless things that devour the time that could be put to better professional or creative use. Or it could be any of numerous other breaking points that seem to be looming on the horizons of a multitude of possible worlds. I just know that my current way of doing things can't sustain itself for much longer. God, just give me some time. Give me some time for the untapped energy of all these wasted hours to build up pressure and burst out of me like fireworks in my mind. I'm pretty good, and I can be better. Adaptation for me is not the process of transforming, but the process of reaching the moment in which I am transformed.